


(small) speeches, heartfelt

by allapplesfall



Series: nuclear family disarmament [3]
Category: Dimension 20 (Web Series)
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Episode: s01e15 Family in Flames, Gen, Imprisonment, Late Night Conversations, set during the first few days (of the WEEKS???) that the kids are in jail
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-31
Updated: 2021-01-31
Packaged: 2021-03-17 18:20:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,559
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29104713
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/allapplesfall/pseuds/allapplesfall
Summary: “Gorgug, are you…are you scared?”“Scared?” Gorgug pauses to think about it. He’s angry, sure. Uncomfortable, yeah. Worried, probably. But fear hasn’t really factored into the equation. “Not really.”“Oh. Pfft, yeah, me neither.”or: remember when the bad kids were in jail for like...a significant span of time? wild.
Relationships: Fabian Aramais Seacaster & Gorgug Thistlespring
Series: nuclear family disarmament [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2122017
Comments: 6
Kudos: 81





	(small) speeches, heartfelt

**Author's Note:**

> lmaoo okay listen guys i got arrested this week! it was a whole thing! so i...whipped up a fic of some bad kids boys dealing with the early days of their jailtime in s1? don't ask me how my brain works lol. 
> 
> title is. title is from. title is from "pussy talk" but it's for a REASON (truly only funny to me) and that's that pussy talk was playing on the radio as i was driving to an anti-eviction protest (which is what i got arrested for lol) and then it ALSO played over the radio in the van where i was handcuffed with six other people being driven to the jail. movie moments. anyway! hope u enjoy lol it's really just some sweet boys comforting each other during the time before they were moved into separate cells

“Hey, uh, Gorgug?”

Gorgug shifts in his cot, turning towards the voice. He winces as the metal creaks underneath him.

(Why does he have to be so big? Why does his body have to move in ways he doesn’t want it to? Why can’t he control it, why does he care so much, why does he have to be in the middle of this big cosmic joke where he feels too dumb to understand the punchline? Why does he not know how to process in any way but a constant, staticky rage and frustration that buzzes in his head, loud, too loud, and the cops took away his headphones and he feels like one of the coiled springs that his parents let him play with as a kid that someone pressed flat and sooner or later it’s gonna–)

Slowly, to try and minimize the chance of waking up the others, he sits up. “Yeah?”

“Are you awake?”

He peers around the dark jail cell. Their beds are thin pads laid atop metal frames jutting directly from the walls. They stack, double decker, like bunkbeds but without the connecting posts. Gorgug sleeps in one of the top ones, above Kristen; originally, he’d been on the bottom, but they’d swapped after the third time he’d hit his head on her bedframe and she’d fallen as she tried to climb down.

On the top bunk at the foot of his own, he finds Fabian’s eyes, wide and round, staring back into his. The other boy’s forehead creases beneath his white hair, which has frizzed in place of his usual curls because “nobody in this place understands the _value_ of proper hair care products.”

“Yeah,” Gorgug says. “I’m awake.” He looks behind him to see if anyone else is, if they’re trying to make an impromptu break for it, but Fig sleeps soundly curled in on herself, her horns poking indents in the pillow above her messy hair. He glances back at Fabian. “Uh, what’s, uh– What’s up?”

Fabian scoots forward. He has a weird kind of body language going on—a type of posture that Gorgug recognizes far more from the mirror than from anything he’s seen from Fabian before. Maybe they are brothers after all. He keeps his voice hushed, self-conscious, as he says: “I, uh. Can we talk?”

Gorgug blinks. “Sure.” Carefully, tensing at every creak, he scooches himself down to the foot of his bed. When he gets there, he looks at Fabian expectantly.

Fabian takes a deep breath. He rubs at his wrists. Gorgug understands: the bases of his palms are still tender where the handcuffs had bitten into his skin, too. “I can’t sleep,” he admits.

“Oh,” says Gorgug.

“And I couldn’t sleep last night, either, and I thought, oh, it’s because of everything that happened with my papa, so I rolled over and stared at the wall and, you know, dealt with it.”

“Right.”

“But now I can’t sleep again. And I think….” His voice drops low, away from the affect he usually tries to play up. “Gorgug, are you…are you scared?”

“Scared?” Gorgug pauses to think about it. He’s angry, sure. Uncomfortable, yeah. Worried, probably. But fear hasn’t really factored into the equation. “Not really.”

“Oh. Pfft, yeah, me neither.”

Gorgug frowns. “I mean, it’s okay if you are. That would be– That would be, like, normal, right? We are in jail.”

“No, I– What are you talking about? I’m not scared. I’m the son of Bill Seacaster. A couple days in the brig don’t scare me.”

“Oh. Sorry. How- How, uh, have you been doing with that? The whole dad thing.”

“Fine. Good. I’m great, really. Didn’t you see me? I took him out, pop-pop, one-two.”

“…Right.”

Quiet settles in for a moment, pooling between them. The dark cell fills with the sounds of their friends’ sleep. Riz, beneath Fabian, breathes in his small goblin snuffles, while Kristen snores softly below Gorgug and Fig’s restless legs rustle behind him. Adaine hasn’t finished trancing yet, so he doesn’t hear anything from her bunk. Down the hall, cell doors clang and the far-off cops murmur in conversation.

Gorgug misses being home. He misses the smell of his tree, crisp and woody and _living_. He misses staring at the walls and tracing the grain of the xylem with his eyes. Here it smells like iron and sweat, and maybe a bit of piss from the toilet in the corner. He misses the familiar hug of his headphones around his ears—even with the ambient noise of five other people in the room with him, the overall silence makes him feel empty and untethered in a way he hates.

Everything about this just feels _wrong_.

“I just never thought he would be mixed up in all this, you know? Like, he does dastardly deeds and all that, of course. He’s a _pirate_. But this? With the palimpsests? I don’t know.”

“Yeah,” Gorgug says. “That sounds really hard.”

Fabian sighs. His shoulders hunch, sad and small, and Gorgug hates it.

“You, um. You know what my parents do to make me feel better when things are hard?”

“I swear, if you start singing right now, I’m gonna kill you.”

Gorgug’s mouth slants into a lopsided smile. “No, no, I won’t.”

“Thank god.”

“You take your sheet–” Gorgug reaches behind him and pulls his thin, pilling blanket and the top sheet down to him– “and you wrap it around your shoulders, like this.”

Fabian frowns. “Seriously?”

“Yeah.” Gorgug wraps his blanket around him and tucks the ends close by his stomach. “It’s kind of like a hug, you know? It makes me feel more…in my body.”

Fabian eyes him doubtfully. Nevertheless, he follows the directions.

“Whoa,” he says. “I, uh, feel a bit like a baby.”

Gorgug shrugs. “Nothing wrong with that.”

Fabian manages a weak smile. “Yeah. Guess not.”

“You kind of rock the bedding look. You should wear this to school.”

He rolls his eyes. “If we ever go _back_ to school.”

“We’ll go back,” Gorgug says. He makes his words more confident than he feels.

“Yeah.” Fabian dips his head once, then twice like a swaddled woodpecker. “Yeah. Of course we will.”

“Yeah.”

They look at each other. Something passes between them, there in the dark.

“For what it’s worth, I like you better than your dad.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. You’re my friend. He’s not.”

The corner of Fabian’s mouth quirks, just a bit. His tone comes out serious, honest. “That means a lot.”

“No problem.”

“What about you? Are you, like, worried about your parents?”

“Yeah, I am. But I guess– I guess I just have to trust that the other parents will keep them safe until we can get out and take care of this.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah.”

“We got _arrested_. We’re in _jail_.”

“That’s crazy.”

“Crazy shit. God. Do poor people sleep with sheets this rough all the time? What is up with this?”

“Oh, um.” Gorgug’s not sure how to answer that. He doesn’t want Fabian to get the idea that everyone who doesn’t live in a mansion lives with jail-quality linens, but he also doesn’t want him to think that his dad’s money and his comfy lifestyle are unrelated. “I don’t– I mean, my family doesn’t. But we’re more middle-class– Not that I think– I– Jail stuff is bad. Let’s say that.”

“Jail stuff is _bad_.”

A strained whisper comes to them from below. “While I agree, you guys aren’t being as quiet as you think you are.”

“Sorry,” Gorgug says.

“Sorry, The Ball,” echoes Fabian.

They share a not-quite-guilty almost-smile.

“We should probably go to bed,” Fabian cedes. “Who knows the next time The Ball will remember what a bed is for.”

“ _Hey.”_

“Come on, don’t play like you ever sleep.”

“Wuzzgoingon?”

“Nothing. Go back to sleep, Kristen,” Riz says. “We’re all going back to sleep. Right, guys?”

“Right,” Fabian agrees, eyes still creased fondly.

Gorgug nods, though he realizes after that Riz and Kristen can’t see him. “Right.”

“Goodnight,” Riz grumps.

“Goodnight,” Fabian replies.

“Goodnight.”

“Night,” Kristen slurs, sounding mostly asleep again.

Gorgug moves to untangle his sheet and shift back down. Before he can, Fabian’s hand reaches out and catches his arm.

“I wanted to say…thanks, Gorgug,” he whispers. “For, you know. Listening.”

“Sure,” Gorgug says. “Always, yeah.”

Fabian lets go. “Alright, let’s sleep now. Caffeine withdrawal makes The Ball awfully grumpy.”

_“Screw you.”_

Gorgug smiles. He resettles himself on the uncomfy bed, hearing creaking but refusing to let it scrunch up in his mind. If Adaine didn’t break trance and Fig didn’t wake up before, they won’t now. With a couple deep breaths, he curls up on his side, knees sliding into his chest.

This still sucks. He can still feel the phantom pain of handcuffs locking his arms behind his back. He still hates the smell, and the metal, and the quiet. But something about the spring coiled within him has relaxed, somehow. He no longer feels like his bones are going to burst out of his skin, like his whole body is the swollen region of his jaw where his tusks sprouted from. He just…he might be lying in a jail cell, but he has his friends.

They’ll figure this out. Not right away, but together, they’ll figure this out.

He knows they will.

**Author's Note:**

> hands high for some fabian x sheets moments!! 
> 
> anyway, thanks for reading. if you liked it, comments are love <33
> 
> come yell at me abt d20 on tumblr @appleciders!


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